Konrad Dannenberg helped design the engine of the German V-2 rockets that terrorized Antwerp and London during World War II. He later helped forge the Saturn V rockets that took U.S. astronauts to the moon.

One of the last living links to the German team that put the first rocket into suborbital space in 1942, Mr. Dannenberg, who died Monday at age 96 in Huntsville, Ala., contributed to many space milestones, from the Army Redstone missiles to early designs for the U.S. space station. After retiring from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1973, he served along with other German space veterans as a tour guide at local rocket displays around Huntsville, home to the Marshall Space Flight Center. He was an informal adviser on Burt Rutan's 2004 SpaceShipOne, the first private flight to space.

A young rocket enthusiast who was trained in mechanical engineering at the University of Hannover, Mr. Dannenberg served briefly in the German army during the invasion of France. He then joined Werner von Braun's rocket-development team at Peenemünde, a village on an island in the Baltic where the German army had gathered a scientific elite for weapons development. Like many of the scientists, Mr. Dannenberg was also a member of the Nazi Party, having joined in 1932, according to the book "Missiles for the Fatherland: Peenemünde, National Socialism, and the V-2 Missile," by Michael B. Petersen.

The team's critical success came in October 1942, when the rocket reached outer space.

"The final countdown was announced 3-2-1 Zundung [ignition]," Mr. Dannenberg wrote of the launch. "This unforgettable sight is still the highlight of my career, watching it rise vertically off the launching table for the first five seconds and then gradually tilting in the desired flight direction."

The V-2 was relatively ineffective as a weapon, though it spread terror when shot at cities. The design became the basis for later missiles, including the Saturn V. Mr. Dannenberg wasn't involved in later production of the V-2s used in warfare, starting in 1944.

After the war, Mr. Dannenberg was one of 117 German rocket scientists, including Mr. von Braun, brought to the U.S. to jump-start America's missile program. After a few years working on Army missiles at Fort Bliss in Texas, the team was transferred to the Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville, where work on ballistic missiles began in earnest, including the Redstone and Jupiter systems that carried nuclear weapons.

The sudden appearance of dozens of Germans who had worked for the German wehrmacht was initially unsettling to some in what had formerly been a center of cotton production. The Germans, for their part, thought they were being stationed in the boondocks.

"We knew that the people here run around without shoes," Mr. Dannenberg joked to the New York Times in 2007. "They make their money moonshining, and that's what they drink for breakfast, and supper. And so we, in a way, were a little bit disappointed that it was really not that bad." He neglected to add that the von Braun rocketeers were old hands at repurposing the pure ethyl alcohol their craft required.

In 1960, Mr. Dannenberg was named deputy manager of the Saturn program, which was energized by President Kennedy's call for a moonshot. "It makes you jittery to think of the pace at which we must move," he told The Wall Street Journal in 1961. NASA awarded him its Distinguished Service Medal for his role in developing the Saturn, the largest rocket ever built.

After retiring, Mr. Dannenberg helped initiate Space Camp at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville in 1984 and consulted with private industry, which he thought had an important role to play in space exploration. After his first wife died, in 1988, he was remarried to a woman 50 years his junior, who was a tour bus driver at the center. In recent years, he liked to visit a restored Saturn V at the Center, says its chief executive, Larry Capps.

"He would come over on some days and just sit on the rocket and look at it," says Mr. Capps. "He would start talking to anyone who was interested about the early days of the rocket programs. It was the crowning achievement of his life that it was built and tested, and he was very proud of it."